Slashdot Mirror

8-bit Theater. Remember Fighter, Thief, Red Mage, and Black Mage from Final Fantasy? Well, they're the main characters in this strip. Archives go back a year or two. Rather entertaining.

d+pad covers the goings-on at a video game store. The artwork is pretty crude, but if you're into the gaming world at all, you'll enjoy it.

Goats is a VERY disturbing strip. The early artwork was a lot less refined than it is now, but how can you go wrong with a strip that involves overclocked lemons and a Satanic chicken named Diablo?

PvP is a strip about a fictional gaming magazine. Sometimes crass and goofy, but often hilarious (go to any geek gathering and see how many people laugh when you shout "Panda attack!"). I know I'd subscribe to any magazine that had a 300-year-old blue troll as an intern.

And, of course, Sluggy Freelance. Best. Webcomic. Ever. But you really have to go all the way back to the beginning of the archives. There's years of great stuff in there. (Worship Bun-bun!)

I know that no day is complete without reading all my webcomics... which is really easy using bookmarked tabs in Mozilla. I just click on one bookmark, and the browser opens up a dozen separate tabs with all my comics loaded.

Thats a lie and you know it. Linux takes care of itself, it even does my homework and makes friends for me. Just ask the author of Goats, he'll tell you.

A horse is a horse, of course, of course.
A Jedi horse, he uses the Force.
His favorite code to use is Morse.
He's the famous Mister Ed!

From goats.com, one of the funniest comic strips on the web. (Hint: read the "kittens = poptarts" series from their archives.)

I must drink beer.
Beer is the mind killer.
Beer is the little death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my beer.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me, and when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
When the beer is gone, there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

With due credit to the guy who wrote this, if this is indeed the original.

Check out what happened when Reese's threatened to sue Goats over their use of trademark in a similar situation.

-R

Check out what happened when Reese's threatened to sue Goats over their use of trademark in a similar situation.

-R

Check out what happened when Reese's threatened to sue Goats over their use of trademark in a similar situation.

-R

No, he's an entertainment reporter.

When i wake up in the morning, I crack open the daily newspapaper and.... wait that's not true. Lets start again. When I wake up in the morning I turn on my computer, and check out... webcomics.

Angst Technology, Ctrl Alt Del, Dilbert, Errant Story, Force Monkeys, Fox Trot, goats, Life of Riley, Mac Hall, Megatokyo, Misfire, Penny Arcade!, Sinfest, Something Positive, and finally Wendy.

Then, after my daily webcomic barage (not to say that these all update on a daily basis. Some are good [ like ctrl alt del, and penny arcade ] and update regularly. others... well...) I frequent other sites, for information.

Slashdot of course (not linking it...)
Gamespot
Games workshop,
and
Unconventional Conformity.

Other than that, I have a few sites i goto every so often. Or ones which i check throughout the day. But they become less important than the comics.
-Gharbad

You know, I'm gonna go ahead and blame Goats for that one too. There was a strip not that long ago that had a minor appearance by Yakov, and it wasn't long after that that I started noticing those 'In Soviet Russia' posts.. of course, maybe it was the other way around, the artist for Goats is a lsashdot reader, and he might have gotten the idea for it from Slashdot.

First, a quick disclaimer: I have no personal or financial interest in any of these. I own no stock in Adobe or Wacom. Consarnit, I can't even draw.

One of the best comics on Modern Tales are Patent Pending, a drama that is drawn by the same guy who does the comedy Goats (which is free). Two other awe-inspiring MT strips are Makeshift Miracle and American Born Chinese, the former for its art and the latter for its psychological insight.

Three free strips deserving of special mention are Wigu, Achewood, and Scary-Go-Round.

Note that none of these strips concern teenagers who play video games. Hope that's not too much of a disappointment for anyone.

I noticed you have no positive feedback. Or maybe I read over it :P But anyways. Your site is very informative and edumacational, definitely the best site out there. EH?!? What am I, on crack?!? That site is fucking sick, man!!! I don't even WANNA know how you got those pics!! I almost threw up first time I saw that!!! Um I mean .. only time I saw that!!! It fucking took me hours to even forget I ever saw those pics, then someone brought it up again, and .. Aghhhh just shoot me now!!! And why the hell goatse.cx ?!? I don't see any GOATS on there!!! Do *you*?!?!? Dude if I wanted to look up someone's asshole, I'd do it myself. Now excuse me while I go puke again.

`SyN`

Etymology: Medieval Latin ultimatus last, final, from Late Latin, past participle of ultimare to come to an end, be last, from Latin ultimus farthest, last, final, superlative of (assumed) Latin ulter situated beyond

Damn! I knew I should have bought a burner before the MPAA made 'em illegal...

Because you had to open your mouth all future posts on this thread can only aspire to be penultimate in pedantry.

Speaking of pedantry...

Goats Is currently at Comicon putting out a second book.

Hah! You want me to click a link labelled "Goats"? Not bloody likely. ;)

Ok, does Megatokyo have that large of a following here @ /. ??

Because amongst other webcomics:
Goats Is currently at Comicon putting out a second book.
Achewood is finishing up the polishing touches on a book.
Cat and Girl has a book going out.
As do a whole slew of others. Why don't they get mentioned??

So do I

Co-ops are great for fresh food, but are you going to be able to keep up with the demand for fresh brains?

Easy.

(Thankyou, goats.)

Big Vault? Hillary Rosen?

Why, drop it on her, of course.

But using a cow would be infinitely more practical.

Why Freenet? It's such a tremendous effort, for something that so few will use. In fact, does anyone actually use it for getting work done? Heck, does anyone use it for anything? (I honestly want to know!)

Forgetting about all the anonymity/freedom-related arguments in favor of freenet... it provides a means of allowing the users to pay for your content distribution!

This is great for folks running, say, a free webcomic who hitherto have had to pay $750 a month for their bandwidth. With freenet, the cost of distributing the content is paid by the users; the more the users use it, the more it's automatically distributed. That has a great deal of value. If I were running a non-commercial web site with a fair bit of traffic and couldn't find free hosting elsewhere, I'd probably run it on freenet myself (perhaps with a for-pay web version so folks who want to go that route can pay for the bandwidth themselves). If the webcomic authors wanted to take advantage of freenet's anonymity features (which they probably wouldn't -- getting credit for your work is a Good Thing), they could also avoid being sued by corporations angry about such things as, say, Jesus peanut butter cups.

Sure, not many people use it right now. Once critical mass is reached (of either users or content), it's reasonable to expect that to change.

Open Source doesn't have a whole lot of alliances these days, we need to make the ones we have strong.

Huh?

The true friends of OSS are the folks and companies who write and fund the code (though the latter group may do it not out of friendship but because it's profitable, I count them "friends" nonetheless -- just potentially fickle ones). Slashdot is just a discussion forum. It contributes no code, no design for code, persuedes few who aren't already part of the community... it's fun, sure, but I'd hardly say it's necessary for the open source (or free software) community to survive, or even particularly useful towards that goal.

I pay for some web content -- see goats, for instance. If I choose not to pay for some service, however (ie. removal of ads from /.), that's my choice; I'd rather not be portrayed as unsuportive of OSS (despite the code I write) because of it.

"Our right to shop for housewares in a safe environment outweighs his right to anal sovereignty. This is America, dammit."

I think you're wrong. See http://www.goats.com/. (Not at all related to the disgusting goat site -- unfortunate that I have to say that.) They've been running on a voluntary-donation model for several months.

People *like* to pay for good sites that have good content.

I think micropayments would work, too, but $0.01/page is *way* too large -- it should be a tenth of that or less. And of course, it has to be cross-platform and vendor-independent, or else we're back to the days of Compu$erve.

This is also, come to think of it, very obvious, but a comic strip doe not rely on the quality of the drawing (I like the simplistic style anyway), but the jokes. If you don't like the jokes, you have a valid complaint, go someplace else.. but don't flame about Illiad's drawing.

When the jokes are stale, lame, or just plain awful (as UF has been for the past 3+ years), there's little left to keep a person interested but the art. And UF never had that, either. However, you're right. I don't like UF, and I don't read it. I prefer to waste my online time reading better strips, like Penny Arcade, Goats, Diesel Sweeties, 8-bit Theater, Sinfest, and way too many more to list here, all of which have (IMNSHO) better jokes, better storylines, better art, better attitudes, and better execution than UF. Sure, not all of those are daily strips, but some are. Sinfest is. Tatsuya Ishida is able to pump out teh funney (no, that's not misspelled) every day, with amazing art to go along with it. I would call T's art "simplistic", in that it's generally all various lines, with just enough shading to suggest backgrounds and such. Illiad's art, on the other hand, is what i would call sloppy.

Erhm.... no, no goat in userfriendly. They have a dustpuppy, a crudpuppy, and an AI named Erwin though. If you're into goats in comic strips, check out Goats.

Yeah, and this has nothing to do with encryption. They use steganography. I found the phrase "Help us! We've been captured by the NSA!" embedded in one of the header files. Story here .

Tell me how anything in the middle matters.

Maybe your right...

Photos of your mom

Kinda opens up a new level of humor...

• reinventing micropayments
• micro-thoughs on micropayments
• the last word on micropayments and scott mccloud

Goats is one of many great online comics, but happens to be my favorite.

• reinventing micropayments
• micro-thoughs on micropayments
• the last word on micropayments and scott mccloud

Goats is one of many great online comics, but happens to be my favorite.

• reinventing micropayments
• micro-thoughs on micropayments
• the last word on micropayments and scott mccloud

Goats is one of many great online comics, but happens to be my favorite.

• reinventing micropayments
• micro-thoughs on micropayments
• the last word on micropayments and scott mccloud

Goats is one of many great online comics, but happens to be my favorite.

Goats.com (not that naughty site...) has been discussing mircopayments a bit recently. This is a good example of something that I would be willing to pay pennies per day to see, and it's interesting to see how current methods do or do not work.

• We have no system aside from credit cards, checks & cash which is universally trusted to be acceptable for transactions. Few people trust systems like PayPal, and definitely not for miniscule payments when the charge for each is more than the payment itself.
  
• cash is problematic to send to a content person
• checks are similarly hard to transfer
• so, we're currently stuck with credit cards, which have their own history and problems
• Most people don't want and are trained not to have small purchases on their credit card. It's gone down in recent years, from a minimum of $20+ to $10+ to sometimes $5, but people are hesitant to do that.
• And finally, and it's really the truth: most content sucks. Lots of people produce and sell stuff that probably shouldn't, so the quality is at best low to poor for the majority of work. We're not all Shakespeare or Picasso.

The "exclamation point" shown on http://www.metaresearch.org/solar%20system/cydonia /asom/artifact_html/slide.asp?image=18 is clearly not "!" but "/." Someone on the surface obviously created a giant palm robot running on parrot and driven by a mutant hamster

Probably the Techno Talking Babes or Neil & Bob

We're doing pretty well over at Goats using a combination of voluntary donations via the Amazon and PayPal system, along with incentives like the option to turn banner ads off for registered users. If your content is truly worth something to your users, you should be able to raise enough to keep yourself afloat with a similar system.
-----------------

Yep, all that content, and yet when there's a slow day at work I can still run out of interesting stuff to look at on the internet.

little gamers, penny arcade, goats (not goatse), and badtech: online comics. It'll take a while to browse the entire archive.

everything 2: nearly half a million writeups on topics from aardvarks to zzyzx.

I recently contributed to one of my favorite web comics and was disappointed in the procedure.

1.) I was taken away from the site to do it. (as opposed to having a small new window pop up.)
2.) I had several pages to click through to make the payment.
3.) I ended up at Amazon.com, and not back at the originating page.

With some work I think these honor system payments will provide an ok solution, but not for anyone providing content for a living.

For content providers who need to make money, networks might be a good idea - where a user would pay a network a set recurring fee for accessing a selected group of sites - for example I could "subscribe" to Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Everything2, Goats, and Userfriendly for $5.00/month.

The network could provide an app to generate encrypted ip + timestamp + websites allowed "network cookie" on a daily basis so sites would know who their paying customers were.

It's definitely a change in philosophy from the honor system, but it might work a little better.

I disagree completely and wholeheartedly.

I see banner ads as an assault on my psyche, trying to extract from me things ($$$) which I want to keep.

IF banner ads work, then I am paying to look at free sites one way or another (TANSTAAFL, and all that). I would rather be subjected to an earnest plea to support the site than I would subject myself to the creations of people whose very job is to subtly manipulate my psyche in the favor of their company.

A number of the online comics I frequently read have shifted in the direction of a PBS model - if you like it, send us a few bucks. If we get enough bucks we'll run some kind of special feature (not too unlike the Street Performer Protocol). It is not anywhere near as obtrusive as your example - one of the reasons at least Penny-Arcade shifted to this model is that ad banners were too obtrusive and disruped their site. (their network kept sneaking popups in, plus just vibrating windows and stuff)

I agree this is a problem, but I disagree that it's a fatal flaw. People could, for example set up local automated scripts(or download bots from TUCOWS) to take care of the pop ups behind the scenes (e.g. they authorize sites X Y and Z automatically). They still have to deal with new sites, but there are still schemes yet to be discovered to deal with these situations with a minimal amount of hassle.

Don't you think that would be highly annoying? I doubt techincally illiterate people will be willing to do this. So, maybe it'll get integrated into MSIE 7. But just like with cookies, the default will probably be "Yes, to everything", and that leaves annoying pop-up window attacks still possible (also, consider the attack of hidden frames: have half the website devoted to frames that look like background, yet charge the user seperately. This is less obivous than popping up windows all over the place.)

And let's look at what we get in return, quality websites. The days of great sites like this arrising from ad revenue are numbered.

This is probably true. Ads are clearly not the way to make money on the internet. They don't work, as Jakob Neilsein is fond of pointing out. I'm just saying that micropayments, at least in their current form are also not the way to do it. Personally, I don't mind this. There are very few "content" sites that I actually like. Salon.com is about the only one. The rest...well, I'd be happy to see them go, and see the internet move back into a more person-to-person communication medium. Yet, as you point out, even this has costs. Maybe FreeNet will help with this, because it distributes the bandwidth across the whole network. We'll see. In the meantime, Clay Shirky suggests three options in his article:

1. Aggregation -- bundle a large number of low-value things together
2. Subscription -- pay for the site. I'm not sure if this will work (see: Slate.com), but maybe it would for a network of related sites (see: pr0n)
3. Subsidy -- Shirky points out that most real-world art centers (museums, operas, etc) are funded this way. This is what Amazon's Honor System is (not a micropayment as is often claimed). Goats and Penny Arcade are now trying this with PayPal and Amazon. Online comics are well suited for this type of system, I think, because they take a lot of work and skill to do right, and have a strong network of fans. It will be interesting to see if it works.

As for flat fees, your point only applies to the United States. I've heard that in other countries Internet access fees are generally per hour. As much as we like to think we're the only part of the world that matters, we're not :)

But remember that Europeans HATE this!

Actually that tip jar has been up at PA for only a week this coming Wednesday. Pretty good results for so short a time, but then as Tycho pointed out on one of his posts, PA get's something like 30,000 unique hits on strip days. I'm guessing not many web comics can say that.

The guys who do Goats strip are doing the Amazon/PayPal tip jar thing as well. There up to about $1400 through the Amazon portion so far, probably more through PayPal. I suspect we'll start seeing a lot of other web comics start doing this pretty soon.

I for one hope this tip-jar thing sticks around. For PA, I plan on giving a dollar or two probably once a month. It's a lot better than any form of subscription service, as it allows me to choose when and where I want to pay for the content or not. Plus, it in theory allows the creators to give us a better product. Privacy I don't really see as that big an issue. It's no different than any other credit-card transaction I've made over the web the past 2 years. And according to the Amazon site, the creators you donate too don't recieve the identification of who's donating in any way.

The cut Amazon takes out is kinda steep (15%), but they do make it very easy for both the customers and the site creators to set things up. Amazon's been psudo-evil in the past with 1-Click and target pricing, but on this one I think they've done things right.

The Trib picked a few strips as a survey of the field. No such list would get everything good. The links I added were meta-sites and mega-sites, not individual strips.

Having said that, here are some more that might appeal to fellow Slashers:

o Goats: nominally a couple of Web developers, mostly about ... oh, never mind, just read it. PG-13; your mom might not like it.

o Freefall: A captain of a starship (that's only flown once in the history of the strip), his robot sidekick, and his furry engineer. SF meets Dilbert in a kindler, gentler way.

o GPF: life at a software development company with an unfortunate name.

o Help Desk: life at the tech support desk of a software megacompany named Ubersoft (with products such as Nifty Doorways and Tactile Basic).

(The last two recently had a crossover, a pretty common occurence in online strips.)

o Acid Reflux (previously here): vaguely-D&D-ish strip about a young god trying to restore the universe her sister abandoned.

o Mega Tokyo: a couple of American gamers stranded in Japan.

o Real Life: a couple of American gamers who know they're comic strip characters.

o Schlock Mercenary: light SF strip.

All have complete archives back to the first strip, so you can catch up at your leisure. Enjoy!

Dr. Fun, Goats, Bob the Angry Flower and Too Much Coffee Man.

DEATH TO MODERN-DAY ADVERTISING!!! Today's ads don't just inform us of a product's existence; they also prey on our minds with flashing text, glitzy graphics, buzzwords by the dozen, and little white lies. Fortunately, we have the right to censor those ads; unfortunately, not all of us have the knowledge to do so. I'm striving to change that.

Hear, hear. What better way to encourage individuals to set up and maintain sites like SomethingAwful?

"Hey, I like your site and visit it every day, but no way in HELL am I gonna contribute to YOUR banner revenue!"

There are a handful of really quality websites out there that are run by dedicated individuals who generally end up paying considerable sums out of their own pockets to provide the world with their site. Pete at Sluggy Freelance is one. Jon at Goats is another. They're great people, and they pour a great deal of personal time, thought and energy into something that generally ends up costing them money. The more people there are blocking the ads on their site, the more they need to pay out of their own pocket to keep their site going.

I honestly hope your little crusade to "educate" people into blocking ads falls on it's ass. I don't like that Treeloot monkey much, either, but I'm not enough of a jerk to deny the keepers of my favorite sites what little return for their investment they get.

Or had you never really considered that you were telling the guy who writes all that stuff you really like to go piss up a rope?

information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.

Since McCloud's recent strip, it's been suggested that Keenspot Comics (home of half the comics listed here) start this micropayment trend. However, I think this would be a really bad move. As it has been stated, this would only work for comics that are already popular and would surely stunt the growth of even popular comics. What new reader would pay for Nukees when Goats is available for free? Even though Keenspot and Keenspace house most of the webcomics out there, only the most die-hard fans will bother paying when all other web content is free. For artists that have worked for years for little to no pay, I think readership and artistic integrity is still more important than cash.

I think the solution, if the advertising market continues to die, is "Pay for convenience," not for content. We may, for instance, institute subscription rates for email delivery, or even home paper delivery (would you pay for a monthly digest of your favorite webcomic snailmailed to you?)

The real question is what will people pay for? Will people pay for convenience? It's difficult to tell. It was mentioned that Carson Fire of Elf Life has recently offered a cast shirt for sale, but it was not mentioned that few have bought that shirt. I've seen lots of shirts go unsold even though reader polls have shown high interest. So it turns out readers are lying when they say they'll pay for something? I think so. That music label buying Napster, for instance, is convinced that 1/2 of the current users will pay a $15/month fee for its use, based on a poll they conducted. How many of you believe that?

So what will people pay for? That's the real question.

Darren "Gav" Bleuel
Keenspot Comics
Nukees, an atomic comic.

Lates...
Darren "Gav" Bleuel
Nukees, an atomic comic

Solar Wars is a clone of Scorched Earth for your NES. The developers (Chris Covell and friends) have released the full source and binaries for download RIGHT HERE! (You'll need an NES emulator; get it for Linux86, DOS, or Windows.)

Of course, you could also scorch your brain at Goats.com (not Goatse.cx!)
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

BSI's Everything 2 BBS is profusely linked in much the same way. But are you trying to link to Goats (a comic strip) or Goatse (the One True Ass Pic)?
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.

Goats the Comic Strip used a similar storyline where a corporation patented the human genome. It's quite funny, as are the rest of the strips.
***

Goats the Comic Strip used a similar storyline where a corporation patented the human genome. It's quite funny, as are the rest of the strips.
***

Doesn't the license Gnome uses restrict mentioning the name 'Gnome' in the same sentance as GUIs that haven't begged forgiveness yet?

-Adam

Not only will this device enable me to conquer the world, it also turns kittens into poptarts.

It also means that an infinite number of chickens will only supply as much funny as the first two. Cleary the implications of this are astounding, and will shake the scientific community to the core. For more information, see this Goats.com comic on the subject. I would have had the whole quote and link in my sig, but that damn 120 character limit...